‘Sporting’ wickets?! 4 December 2006

It’s a well known and accepted fact that pitches in Australia, with the exception of WACA (Perth), are generally excellent for batting, in general – just check out Ponting, Hayden and Gilchrist’s average over the years! Or for that matter, Dravid, Tendulkar and Sehwag’s exploits a few seasons back. :-) Sure, the SCG track (Sydney) helps the odd twirler later on, the Gabba (Brisbane) gets some cracks sometimes, but in general, these are pitches with true, consistent bounce and batting is generally as easy as at St John’s (Antigua) or Qaddafi (Lahore).

So do the Aussies get half the flak for these pitches that the curators and administrators (eg Mr. Bashir and the PCB) in the sub-continent get for very similar tracks? Of course not. Just as Australian players can get away with harrassing and insulting the umpire, abusing and sledging their opponents and even cheating without drawing any sanctions, it seems their curators and groundsmen are similary ‘above’ the law. I don’t hear any calls for “sporting” tracks for the Ashes, or pitches that help both the batsmen and the bowlers.

A flat-track in Australia, such as the one for the current Adelaide Test (and also at the Gabba for the first Test) is accepted without an eyebrow being raised. Dull attritional cricket apparently makes for intriguing viewing, we are told, whilst the same stuff in Pakistan or India is called boring! Idiots like Sanjay Manjrekar couldn’t shut up about the current Karachi test pitch (Pak v WI), even though we had an exciting, interesting and conclusive match there – what about the Adelaide pitch then, Sanjay? Care to check out the scorecards for South Australia’s home matches for the last few seasons?!

hmm… is this a case of double-standards? Or just the usual bare-faced hypocrisy? :-)

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You pretty much sum it up, it’s both double standards and hypocrisy. Asian pitches result in runs it’s a flat track; they result in wickets they are sub-standard and they spin it’s dustbowls….
What I can’t understand is people like Manjrekar and Ramiz Raja being so vocal during the Karachi Test. It’s a PR war out there and Asia is losing it and those whose opinions actually gets aired around the world and shapes people’s views, are doing a terrible job.
I don’t think any Aussie commentators slagged the Adelaide pitch, but we had Raja leading the charge in Karachi. And the Karachi Test was an interesting battle.